Small Changes
From TCWiki
This is another short story focusing on Laura and Will. However! This is a bizarro-universe story. The title, Small Changes, refers to the idea of two small changes between the world of tC and the world of this story. Firstly, Laura was not raised in a Catholic orphanage (leading to her later being trained to hunt and kill undead). Instead, she had to grow up on the streets of Newark, New Jersey, as... well, an orphan. (She doesn't magically get parents, but she's too badass for "Tossed out into the world as an infant" to have killed her.) Secondly, rather than settle in Seattle and end up doing Stuff Involving Computers, Will settled in Chicago and got involved with the business his grandfather had left, almost 60 years before: Organized crime.
Small Changes is something I do to get random ideas out of my head and to generate inspiration for tC proper. The main factor in writing is my own enjoyment and obeying my muse, leading to some parts of the story not fitting with others. The writing itself, I hope, is of good quality just 'cause of my own pride. But, for instance, the first person section about planes is from Will's POV, and I didn't have a way to do "Obey muse" and "Explain that it's Will" at the same time.
Bizarro-Will and my muse are both scary people, so I try to do what they say.
Vavrek 18:31, 27 Apr 2008 (PDT)
On with the show...
A city is a beast. It stretches and grows through its life. Some reach their peak, grow frail, and eventually die. Others become cancerous, growing without heed or need, simply because they can. Surrounding townships are engulfed as the virus laden flesh of the metropolis expands ever more, crossing state lines, national boundaries, and spreading its stench to nearby planes of existence, drawing them in tighter until there is only the City, until it cannot be removed or all would fall. While some are certainly larger, and others have by far more citizens, no city sets the standard but one, the Empire City itself, New York. While the brain may be in Manhattan and the heart in Brooklyn, this half-mythic beast has grown beyond its parent state, beyond any constraint but the speed of infrastructure development. The Garden next door is only greener because your own is made of nothing but brick, glass, and steel, and so our story takes us to Jersey, to the state's largest city, upon whose streets one woman walks unknown amongst her subjects.
Her steps are sure. She does not know fear, though calculated risk is a part of any game worth playing. The people around her do not know her power, her position, or what influence she has on every moment of their lives. To them, she nothing more than a stranger, nothing less than another human being. The streets smell. Not bad, not to one who grew up on them, but every sandwich shop, every exhaust pipe, every butcher she passes adds to the experience.
It is with little preamble as they attack. Three men with guns, armor, even uniforms, that try to jump her. Admittedly, she had turned down a dark alley, small enough that some might doubt three such men could even hide in that space. The first dies quickly, a stiletto punching through his artery and just touching the cerebellum before it is pulled out and he can't see straight anymore, can't think right, can't hardly... The second already has his gun out by now and a shot is fired just as the knife hits his armpit. It is pulled out again, just far enough to strike at the throat, slicing away the soft tissues in front, the blood vessels and windpipe, the muscles and esophagus.
During this, the third has stared on with a sort of dumb awe, unable to comprehend. As this woman turns to him, he remembers the gun in his hand. And just before she snaps the tendon in his elbow, just before the stiletto is driving through the nasal cavity and into the brain, she shakes her head very slightly. The bodies are left to be found by their superiors.
Laura charged into her office. The smoky air and warm wood paneling made the room seem smaller than it is, they served to reinforce her anger as she opened the liquor cabinet.
"Who was it this time?" Leonard rested his pencil against the pad of paper in his hand.
"Pigs!" She poured a shot of cognac, downed it, and repeated this process twice. Leonard looked in doubt when she slumped back in her chair.
"Only three?"
"I know!" Laura slammed a hand against her desk. "I've been running it around in my head, it's just..."
"Stupid."
"Exactly, 'xactly. You want a send a message, don't send one that says 'We suck!' in big fat neon letters. Do something that, I dunno, makes fucking sense." She sighed, tried to slump lower into the chair, and failed. "What happened while I was out?"
Leonard flipped through the pad of paper, pretending he needed it. "Report came in from a hydroponics operation in the lower east side. Seems half a crop was lost due to contamination." He explained at Laura's look. "Somebody's Everclear spilled onto the thing and their cigarette lit it off when they leaned in close. Lost his eyebrows, along with a bunch of skin." This got a grunt of approval as she muttered about unprofessionalism. He moved on. "The shipment from Antigua arrived on schedule, a bunch of other things happened like they're supposed to, and someone has requested an audience with you. A girl, maybe sixteen, eighteen."
She brightened up at this, her posture straightened, she sat up and squared her shoulders. Her hands moved fast, trying to rearrange or clean her desk, dropping the empty shot glass in a drawer. After about a minute of this, she stopped, set her hands down, and put on a cheery smile.
"How do I look?"
"Fifty times less scary than you are." This set Laura off, laughing madly. When she had finally calmed down, Leonard brought the girl in.
Henrietta was nervous. She sniffled. The inside was warm, humid. She could take off her gloves. The young man came out again. She thought of him as young, despite being at least five years older than herself. Maybe closer to ten. It was with a gentle smile that he showed Henrietta into the office. It was the kind of room that seemed larger than it really was. Where the importance of the location overruled your sense of size. The desk was by no means small, a massive slab of mahogany. Sniffling quickly, Henrietta read the name on the small brass plaque.
LAURA BRANDT
The name stood alone, nothing to define it, and finally this girl raised her eyes to Laura herself. Even inside, the woman had on a heavy winter coat. The smile on her face felt genuine, but her eyes... Under Laura's gaze, Henrietta felt exposed. As though a spotlight was turned on all her flaws, or like she had been taken apart piece by piece and was in the process of being weighed and measured one limb at a time.
"Now, my dear, please. Tell me what I can do for you." Laura's voice matched her face. Welcoming, calm, someone who could help.
"Well'm, see..." Henrietta heaved a sigh, tried to steady herself, and started over. "I can't go back, I mean... I got no money, living on the streets an... and I heard that you sometimes gave people work."
"Favors. A favor for you, to give you a career. A favor to someone else, for giving them an employee." Two favors she could call in. "Do you have any skills, girl?"
"No, not really... I'm good with people, is all. Oh, I've got good handwriting." She added the last suddenly, thinking of the friends she used to have, how they'd always complimented her.
Laura nodded, slowly. After taking a few moments to consider the situation and shuffling a few papers around on her desk, she looked to Leonard. "Contact Mistress Montgomery, tell her we have someone fresh for her. And call a cab." She looked at the girl. "By tomorrow night, you will begin training. Don't fret, it's good work, so be glad for it."
"But Ms. Montgomery..." Henrietta saw Laura's face; the pretense of kindness had vanished. "Alright. Thank you, my lady."
"The proper title," Laura said, "is Baroness."
There is a bank in the lower west side. That's a dumb sentence, because there are a lot of banks on the lower west side. Which happens to be about seven hundred miles west of the lower east side, for those keeping track, and is smack dab in the middle of Chicago. There's a bank being robbed in the lower west side. It's not much of a bank, not the kind of place our dear protagonists would bother robbing.
This bank was owned by a friend, someone who'd dealt with other friends, and significant people before. So, the security was a step above state of the art and a step beyond the law. Which led to a bunch of mugs, thugs, and wiseguys commanded by one underboss defending a bank.
Really, Will figured, it wasn't so much 'defending a bank' as it was 'killing idiots who try to work independent'. He'd left most of the guys back at the bank and taken off to try and find the would-be robbers before they got to the building. Luck was working, either for or against him, and they slipped past. This meant he could come up from behind.
"Where are they now?"
"Working on vault one." The signal was clear, very little static.
"Alright, wait sixty seconds and move in on them." Will ran over the floorplan in his head. "Move at a walk."
"Will do, boss."
He drove the car up onto the sidewalk outside the bank. Reaching into the back, he pulled the blanket aside and grabbed an assault rifle, chambering the first round as he stepped up to the revolving door. The lobby was clear. The robbers had just noticed the three men coming down from the offices, had just started to turn and raise their weapons, when Will opened fire. Bullets don't kill as fast in real life as they do in the movies, but they do a damn good job of getting the other guy to stop fighting. Will stepped neatly around a growing pool of blood.
"Seen any more?" Four people was a lot, sure, but big teams were in vogue this year.
"Yeah, Bill's got the lookout down. Tryin' ta see who they are, all that."
Will lit a cigarette, inhaled. "Alright, you guys got it. If some five headed dragon shows up, call me. But nothing less important!" He shouted the last instruction from the lobby, was soon in his car, and drove back to work.
Will had bought the bar three years ago. A few of his cousins owned the nearby hotel, coffee shop, and the rest of the surrounding blocks. After the first year, he'd found somebody else to handle the management. Every Tuesday, there was a poker game held in the back. The stakes were decided by the regulars, at the end of the prior week's game, and anybody who could make ten antes was allowed in. But the table had a reputation for tossing people out early. Large stacks of chips moved, and moved fast, so only the high rollers could stay in the game for long.
Sitting back down at the table, apologizing for his absence, Will picked up his glass of brandy and took a sip. The next hand was dealt. His cards were crap and he bid high. The next two cards he got were better, so he bid lower. Two men folded at that point, while one woman got into a bidding war with Charlie. Will sat in their crossfire. Somebody knocked at the door, came inside.
"Boss," Tom was the manager's assistant, running the place for the night.
"Nrh?"
"Somebody here to see you." Will was half out of his chair when that somebody walked in. Tom practically snapped to attention, while many of the card players straighted up in their chairs.
"Uncle Alfie!" Will smiled. "What brings you down 'ere?"
"Will, m'boy, nice to see you too. But... what I have to say is for you alone." Alfredo wasn't technically his uncle, he was Will's father's cousin. They didn't let this get in the way of things.
"Guys, you heard him. We'll start the game back up in half an hour."
Most of the players left, except for two who'd been bidding. "We haven't finished this hand." Will flipped over the woman's and Charlie's cards. After looking from one to the other, he turned over his own.
"I win. Now go." They went. Will and Alfie sat down. "What's going on, sir?"
Alfredo waved away the formality. "Nothing major, nothing huge. So far. You remember that New Yorker we're working with?"
"Billing... Bellington?"
"Bellingham. George Bellingham. We're sponsoring him this year, trying to get an ear, a hand, somewhere high. You have to pay attention to this shit someday, m'boy, so listen close." Will smiled, and listened to his uncle.
Laura made a sharp turn, cutting a delivery truck off and starting a chain reaction of honking, profanity, and frustration that reached out for miles and resulted in the death of Howard Melville Parker (single, no children).
"Hate those meetings." Laura said yet another time. "Hate." The car was maneuvered, finally getting onto the bridge and settling down to a constant speed. "What did you learn?"
"Gloria and Mercedes have more money to spend than they did last time. They kept preening themselves, tossing a friendly glance between each other... George was pissed off about something, which according to my sources was an assassination attempt on the Mayor that slipped past him." While the bigwigs watched each other during the meeting, negotiating deals and discussing affairs, their aides played the same game on an unspoken level, trying to come away with the best ratio of information given and received. "And Mercedes still thinks I'm gay."
"Rodriguez and Petrovich mentioned something about dealing with an external matter." Petrovich had brought it up, Rodriguez had joined in too fast. "Check with the spies, see if we need to activate a sleeper." She sighed, watching the traffic as her car zoomed past. Leonard made a few marks in his yellow pad of paper.
"This," he said after a while, "Is when I would traditionally ask what's bothering you. You're thinking about the cops who made an attempt."
"No!" Laura waved a hand around the inside of the car. "...yes. Sort of. Have to find who gave the first order. No use lashing out at hogs, no matter the fun. Make an example." They rode in silence after that, Laura swerving through traffic to get home, Leonard putting down more of his notes. It wasn't until they got back to the office, after Laura had taken a shower, that either of them spoke.
"That guy's up for reelection this year?" Laura ran the towel through her hair another time.
"The senator?"
"Yeah, yeah, the one who likes to live upstate, near Syracuse?"
"Two-time Senator George C. Bellingham." Leonard was better than any filing cabinet ever conceived. He had a dry delivery. "You want to hit a Senator?"
"No, no," she leaned back in her chair, loose, damp hair hanging down the back. "I want to hit a Senator's daughter."
Planes suck. They're horrible. You get inside, you're cramped. It's loud. Good god is it loud. There's no real chance to walk around and you can't switch seats once you get inside. Worst of all, you just have to sit there, instead of actually flying the plane, having some control of what you're doing.
But when the Don walks into your bar and asks something of you, you do it. So here I am, stuck on a damn plane to New York. I think this airline watered the whisky. It's either that or I'm getting too snobby for my own good. The assignment I'd been given was simple, no need to talk about it. unfortunately, I was meeting up with my team in Manhattan, a city (borough, whatever) I would prefer to never set foot in as long as I live. The reasons are all old and personal, so don't ask.
With a bump and one of those scraping noises, I was in LaGuardia. I grabbed the rental and drove to the meeting. There was a garage in the alley, some guy to open my door for me when I'd parked. Once up the stairs, he unlocked the door and faded into the background.
I got through the ropes, stepped into the ring. A handful, maybe a dozen or so, were there already. We waited for the last three. When they finally got here, Gregory looked at me and I began to talk.
"Gentlemen. Ladies. The objective is simple. Our family wants the great Senator..." I checked the note in my pocket. "George Chauncy Bellingham... To win his reelection. We're finally making headway and all of that would be lost if somebody new came in. The mission is a little more complex."
I started pacing. "Every politician has a staff, a group of people that get things done. Make a buffer to keep the public out, and make sure the public likes the guy. We can do things a politician's staff cannot. If he asks for something, give it, do it. I want no harm to befall the guy, I want nothing that wouldn't help his public image somehow."
"So we're running errands for well-paid liar?"
"Yes!" I was shouting, staring down the guy who'd spoken. "Because we want him to be our well-paid liar. Any of you mugs here don't understand that?" They shook their heads. Smart bunch. "Good. We leave for Syracuse tomorrow night. Robert has the details." Vaulting over the ropes, I made my exit. Why did it have to be New York...
Leonard had the night off, doing what men with power tended to do: Actions which would prove to Mercedes that he definitely wasn't gay. But, since Mercedes was such a stuck up bitch, he wasn't going to try and prove himself to her, meaning that the snide remarks would continue for years to come.
Laura was out walking again. She had left the 'Ruler in Anonymity' routine at home and driven to Midtown, parking the car somewhere and setting off at random. The hit would be planned out tomorrow, after intel had been compiled. She wasn't nervous, even if she hadn't ordered a hit at Senate level for years. What would the guy have? Secret Service? Piece o' ca--
No. Tomorrow. She forced the Senator, his wife, mistress, and jailbait daughter out of her mind, and looked up from the sidewalk. The Kitchen was dark. Thin fingers of predawn light were stretching out from the Atlantic, so faint you could only see them where the streetlights had failed. The stars were invisible, mythical in the City, where twinkling lights came from broken glass.
"Fuck," Laura said to herself. She was getting too damn poetic. There was a stoop nearby, so she sat down and pulled her coat tighter. The sun came up in two hours, thirty-eight minutes, and it wouldn't be truly warm for hours after that. Laura took out a small knife and fiddled with it, trimming her nails and keeping them scraped clean.
Her head came up when a Benz roared past on the street; shiny black paint reflected streetlamp light far better than asphault or brick. It was a long walk back to the car. Laura sheathed her knife and got started, making it a block and a half before that Benz showed up again. The driver pulled up on her side of the street and got out, some tall guy in a tan suit.
"I hate this fucking town." This wasn't really said to Laura, it was just a blanket statement and she happened to be there. What the guy said to Laura was, "You live here, right?"
"Jersey, mister," Laura said, playing up her accent a tad. "Mama always said to stay away from Hell's Kitchen."
"Whatever, you can give me directions." The guy took a piece of paper out of his back pocket. "Millenium Hilton Hotel, Church street? You know where that is?"
Laura had a moment of pause. This guy couldn't find Ground Zero? "I know it. It's downtown, this is midtown."
The guy nodded like he understood. "Feel like coming with me, sweetie? King size bed, view of the city, all the room service you want..."
Something stopped Laura from laughing. Hell, why not? If he's crap in the sack, she could have fun humiliating him. If not... She walked up to the guy. "Give me your keys, get in the car. Nobody drives me around." Nothing stopped the guy from laughing before he did what she said. Neither of them felt danger, secure in the weapons they lived with.
It was noon when the view was finally appreciated. When Will asked for her name, Laura just shook her head, saying "No... no, no, no, no, no... That's not how this works, see?" She held up her hands, pantomiming their actions with her fingers. "We meet up, we have lots of fun," this was a very inventive finger motion, "and then we separate, never to see one another again, or even know who the other person was. 'Kay?" She pulled him in for one last kiss, before throwing him back on the bed, picking up her coat, and walking out of his life.
